Falty DL – You Stand Uncertain

Remember the first time you realised other people had opinions about you? I do. I was about 12. It was like someone cut the top off my skull and shone a torch in it.

Drew ‘FaltyDL’ Lustman’s obsession with UK garage is similar to this because he’s from New York. The ‘how’ part of this conversation is intolerably boring (man on internet finds music he loves but isn’t near to, etc.) but the ‘what’ part is more interesting. Made at distance, Lustman’s music can’t help but sound abstracted, frustrated and lone. If anything’s underpinned his music to date, it’s a sullenness that’s always lurked beneath skipping snares and bass loom. This is a good thing.

‘You Stand Uncertain’ feels like a culmination of that mood. Acclaim has meant that the sound of FaltyDL isn’t as bound in solitude as it once was; he’s a fairly regular fixture now on London listings and the people that make his music are his friends. That’s why it’s good that tracks like ‘Gospel Of Opel’ and ‘Open Space’ are arriving now, while the mood’s still a little dark. Every time Drew goes back to his apartment in New York it must feel like the end of some colossal party. His music is the sad stuff that’s left in your body once dawn sun comes and dreamland has evaporated.

The most startling development from his earlier work is the addition of real human voices. The tracks Lily McKenzie (‘Brazil’, ‘Waited Patiently’) and Anneka (‘Gospel of Opel’) crop up on are the highlights here: the way their UK voices struggle to calm haywire snares and synth aggro reminds me of girls trying to calm their drunken men on a Friday night.

Amid that clamour is where Drew Lustman wants to be. It’s the desire rather than the realisation that makes this album special.